The Ministry of Economic Development has today officially named Powershop.co.nz as cheapest electricity supplier to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, New Plymouth and Palmerston North in its Quarterly Survey of Electricity Prices.
Powershop.co.nz CEO Ari Sargent says the news was proof that Powershop.co.nz’s low cost business model offered the best deal for consumers.
“It’s all about keeping costs low. The internet is our head office and the rent for a web address isn’t nearly as much as a flash high rise building. We’re small and everything we do, we do to save our customers money,” he said.
Simon Lawrence Manager of Energy Information at the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) encouraged electricity consumers to look at their options.
“The MED encourages people to shop around and Powershop can offer customers good savings compared to other retailers,” Mr Lawrence said.
Mr Sargent said that Powershop’s ability to deliver the cheapest electricity in New Zealand was a testament to the power of increased retail competition
“It’s a simple equation - more competition always creates cheaper prices for consumers. The more small, low cost retailers like Powerhsop that you can get into every market, the cheaper prices will be,” he said.
Mr Sargent said the key to making it easier for new retailers to enter the market was making it easier to buy forward hedge contracts from generators on the wholesale market. Powershop is unusual among power companies as a pure play retailer. Almost all other electricity retailers are also power generators.
“The liquidity of hedge contracts on the wholesale market is the single largest factor determining the level of competition in New Zealand retail electricity markets. If they were easier to buy and sell there’d be more competition from small companies like us and cheaper prices for consumers,” he said.
Mr Sargent said he hoped that the Electricity Market Review currently being undertaken by the Ministry of Economic Development would address this issue.
To read the Quarterly Survey of Electricity Prices, visit MED - Quarterly Survey of Domestic Electricity Prices
Tags: MED, powershop, prices, savings
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The MED survey results were also reported in the Dominion Post.
October 5th, 2009 at 3:08 pm[...] Powershop News » Blog Archive » MED names Powershop as cheapest power company blog.powershop.co.nz/?p=152 – view page – cached October 5th, 2009 | Posted by Ari Sargent in Tags: MED, powershop, prices, — From the page [...]
October 5th, 2009 at 9:43 pmNice one! Just need your customers paying on Snapper and we’re all good
October 5th, 2009 at 9:50 pm@Miki:
Thanks for that. We are open to suggestions on payment methods. Feel free to contact us with ideas/proposals for using snapper.
October 5th, 2009 at 10:00 pmCongrats. It certainly feels like there is a groundswell of support for Powershop out there. I got my parents onto it and on the weekend my Dad was telling all and sundry how great it was and how pleased he was to get away from Genesis.
It may take years to get the sort of volume of customers you need to achieve your vision, but if you keep going as you are (and the incumbents keep failing to take you seriously) I think it’ll happen.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:39 am@Pete:
Thanks for that. Things certainly do seem to have turned upwards for us and yes, there does appear to be a growing groundswell
We will be relaunching our Friend-Get-Friend programme soon (all going to plan, this week) too. This means you can get rewarded for referring your friends to us. You and your Dad could earn yourself a good chunk of power for spreading the word
October 6th, 2009 at 1:16 pmIn a discussion on a TradeMe messageboard someone posted :
“I have the Consumer mag right here and they say this…. In the Wellington region, Genesis Energy came out the best value for money for all small/med/ and large homes.”
I couldn’t let that go without digging out an old Genesis bill, doing my sums and posting this response :
” I suspect the only reason that Genesis was awarded “best value” is that Powershop was not included. I was with Genesis prior to switching to Powershop. After 100 days with Powershop I worked out what Genesis would have charged me assuming their 10% prompt payment discount and assuming their prices haven’t increased since June. I had saved 28% by switching to Powershop.
The Ministry of Economic Development named Powershop.co.nz as the cheapest electricity supplier to Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, New Plymouth and Palmerston North in its October 5 2009 Quarterly Survey of Electricity Prices.
“The MED encourages people to shop around and Powershop can offer customers good savings compared to other retailers,” Mr Simon Lawrence , MED Manager of Energy Information, said.
tinyurl.com/yafyt3l “
October 7th, 2009 at 4:40 pmIf MED can do it, why can’t Consumer do it?
October 7th, 2009 at 5:07 pmPerhaps MED can do it because they are looking *back* at the prices that *were* charged in a historical period, whereas Consumer is looking *forward* and with Powershops unknown future prices, they’re struggling to know what price to throw into their formula.
October 7th, 2009 at 7:01 pmTrue, but Powershop must have some forward-looking algorithm they use in the savings calculator.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:06 pm@Peter @Felix @Andrew:
You are all correct. We have provided Consumer with the information they need to calculate annual power costs. However, they have not yet implemented this, and they appear to have some philosophical issues around our forward pricing. From our perspective Powershop is no different from other retailers in this regard. Any retailer can change their pricing at any time. In this situation Consumer would update Powerswitch with new tariffs. Likewise, we are happy to notify Consumer any time our underlying pricing changes. We hope this can be resolved soon and Powershop will appear in the list (in our rightful place as the cheapest retailer).
October 8th, 2009 at 10:43 amIn the interest of transparency and openness, is it possible for Powershop to publish a schedule of future price changes?
October 13th, 2009 at 8:25 pm@Felix:
As much as we’d like to, it is not really practical for a number of reasons - not least of which is that we don’t actually know.
Our objective is to be ‘cheapest in market’ for most customers and we are prepared to commit to deliver to an annual target, however we cannot say exactly when price movements (up or down) will occur. We only have direct control over the prices for Standard Power products - and we price these products to meet the annual target overall, but from week to week we will price based on a range of variable influences - such as our level of contract cover, prices of competing products (within Powershop) and wholesale market conditions.
What I can also say is that we have no current intention of changing our annual pricing targets.
October 13th, 2009 at 9:57 pmOn 15 October I received am e-mail purporting to be from Powershop and inviting me to click a link to take part in a friend-get-friend-type promotion.
I could find no mention of this promotion on the Powershop website (even though I searched it with Google), and the link in the e-mail did not seem to be to a Powershop page.
Was this phishing spam? If so, it might be a good idea to warn people that it is around.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:32 am@Geoff:
Thanks for bringing this up. It is actually genuine, we are running a friend-get-friend promotion. As far as we are aware there is no phishing going on. Just a reminder to everyone though - never enter your login details on a webpage other than pages at https://secure.powershop.co.nz/
The email you received will have come from Campaign Monitor, the service we use for promotional emails (as it allows us to manage opt-outs etc).
The reason there was nothing about this on our public website is that it is an offer to customers, rather than the general public, but we will put something up soon, so that people can see that the email is genuine.
Sorry to create concern for you, but thanks for the feedback - we’ll take it on board for future campaigns. You can now start recruiting friends to your heart’s content
October 19th, 2009 at 11:40 amAny word yet on when the realtime power readings start feeding through for chch?
October 19th, 2009 at 1:32 pmSo when are you going to extend to Southland
October 20th, 2009 at 4:08 pm@Jackie:
We are currently focusing on consolidating our operations in the areas we are currently supplying. We are continually monitoring opportunities to go into new areas, but in reality it is unlikely that we will be available in Southland until some time next year.
October 20th, 2009 at 5:00 pmHey Warwick - I was wondering the same thing..
October 21st, 2009 at 7:37 pm@Warwick @Simon:
Sorry Warwick I missed your comment earlier.
Just to clarify a couple of things:
a) We have been receiving information for customers with Arc meters for some time, and weekend rebates are already being applied.
b) For customers with AMS meters we will be receiving information about daily consumption, but this will only be provided by AMS once a week.
We have been pushing AMS hard over the past few weeks to get them to deliver on their commitment to us to provide the daily data we need. This seems to have been resolved today, and information has started coming through. Many customers will have received a ‘weekend rebate’ today and we are now confident that this will be included routinely in future account reviews.
We are disappointed in the delays to get to this point, and apologise that it has taken so long, but it now looks like we are back on track.
October 21st, 2009 at 8:48 pm@Ari I can live with the delays cos you keep us up to date on here and I know you are working on it.
I have just seen my credit now - $15.33. Just some feed back for future their is no indication as to what period this covers or how many units.
At a guess I would say my $15.33 is
October 21st, 2009 at 10:14 pm306 units between between 24th Aug & today - would I be correct in thinking this?
@Warwick:
Thanks for the feedback, we’ll look at putting some more detail into the PDF transaction summary.
Your calculation looks pretty good to me. I’ll double check with the team tomorrow and let you know if the date range is different.
October 21st, 2009 at 10:21 pmWhen will you be in Tauranga/Mount Maunganui
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:05 pm@Barry Scott:
Unfortunately it is difficult for us to be competitive in Tauranga/Mount Maunganui because the Tauranga Energy Trust only distribute their dividends to Trustpower customers. Until/unless this changes it could be some time before we are in the area.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:08 pmHi ari am interested in a grid tied micro wind generator, Can your company sell me/buy back the power I generate regards Greg.
November 17th, 2009 at 8:24 pm@Greg:
In principle, yes. Need to work through some detail though, such as:
- what network you are on
- your metering configuration
- any regulatory requirements
Happy to work through this with you. Can you email any further information you have through to info(at)powershop.co.nz and we’ll take a look.
November 17th, 2009 at 9:00 pmHi, we have 2 properties…if you were to supply both of them, could we be billed just once? With our current supplier we get 2 staggered bills which drives me mental.
December 12th, 2009 at 2:08 pm@Corinna:
At present we require one account per property, but we are currently developing a multi-property system - we hope to have this ready before Christmas, if not early in 2010.
With Powershop it is possible to buy your power whenever you like though, so you could login and buy power for both properties at the same time, if that helps.
December 12th, 2009 at 2:31 pm